Saturday, May 27, 2017

There’s an area where very few want to go in mental health and that’s the world of personality disorders. As with everything in this life, there’s a spectrum and we’re all on it in some shape or form. Stress can be defined in many ways, but one of my favourites is that stress is caused by unmet needs. And one of our most important needs is for our caregiver(s) to be present with us. This translates to someone being attuned to us and our needs, we then conclude that our needs and therefore we, matter.

There’s some research that shows that some people who have personality disorders were born that way. They didn’t suffer any childhood trauma that would explain why they are the way they are. But that’s assuming that any trauma was measured properly, based on experience not just events. Besides the more obvious physical and sexual abuse, more insidious and hidden forms of trauma often go undetected or minimised, like neglect. And let’s not forget about accidents and medical procedures. There is also the often overlooked area of trauma in utero which research has shown explains a lot of subsequent “unexplained” behaviour. We’d like to believe that all babies are born a blank slate but that is not the case at all, unfortunately. And then there is the field of epigenetics which helps to explain the phenomenon of intergenerational trauma which is hypothesised to last for at least 7 generations. So even if we haven’t suffered any trauma in this life, which is extremely rare, our life in the womb and the life of our ancestors can explain a lot about our current behaviours.

In his book, Born for Love, Bruce Perry writes about interviewing a teenage boy called Ryan who had raped a 15 year old developmentally disabled girl and showed no remorse, in fact he said “I don’t know what the problem is really, she never would have gotten laid by anyone as good as us”. Perry said he was as cold, perhaps even colder, than any sociopath he had ever interviewed, including some killers. It turned out that by the time Ryan had turned 3, he had had 18 nannies. He would scream if his mother (who spent at most one hour a day with him) picked him up but at age 3, this had stopped. Perry says this is consistent with children who have disrupted attachments, they stop crying and give up trying to get their emotional needs met. He believed that Ryan had attached to 18 different “moms” and each one abandoned him in his eyes, in fact it was his mother who thought the nannies were getting too close to her son who then fired them. Before he started school, the relational part of his brain had become stunted and functioned abnormally according to Perry.

In a course on family trauma I did by Robert Rhoton, he lists a series of behaviours of sympathetic (angry, aggressive, reactive, hostile, self-centred, coercive, bossy, tantrums, impulsive) and parasympathetic (reactive, emotional and psychological distancing, self-centred) dominance (branches of the nervous system), that are consistent with many of the behaviours that we see in personality disorders. When a person is healthy, these two branches are switched on as needed, neither one is permanently on. A dysregulated nervous system is the basis for a lot of our ills, both mental and physical. One of the most defining and despised characteristics of anyone with a personality disorder is that of being self-centred, the extreme end being a complete lack of empathy for others. It’s like their mantra is “what about me?” and I say that as an observation, not a criticism.

I remember hearing Sebern Fisher saying of people with Borderline Personality Disorder that “they don’t have much sense of themselves beyond those feeling states”. Just imagine how that might feel? You’re stuck in sympathetic or parasympathetic dominance, or alternating between the two, and that’s basically your only sense of self. It must be hell on earth. We hear all the time that we should separate the behaviour from the person, especially when it comes to children. But we have very little compassion for that same child who, as an adult, has a mental health problem for whatever reason. How do we ever hope to help anyone rehabilitate if we don’t show them some compassion and understanding for what’s really going on with them?

There are many strong opinions on people with personality disorders, some believing that they are essentially unhelpable. I don’t believe that they are unhelpable or unreachable, maybe some are unreachable because they just can’t, or won’t, open themselves up to any outside input, it’s just too dangerous and risky. I can’t remember who said that children who have suffered developmental trauma usually become either overly responsible or under responsible and in my experience that is very true. I think many who fit into the category of personality disorders are usually under responsible. Very little is their responsibility, it’s like as if they feel they will be annihilated if they own up to anything. As adults, we need to take responsibility for the direction our life is taking, particularly if we don’t like where it’s going. Not taking responsibility is the bane of most people’s lives and the lives of those they touch.

We can’t make others be willing to take responsibility. Our responsibility to ourself is to take care of us first. We do no one any favours by rewarding bad behaviour, least of all ourself. We have a choice as adults to stay or go if we are being abused, though it’s not always an easy choice, but children don’t have any choice. That’s why developmental trauma at the hands of caregivers in particular, is so detrimental. The betrayal and wounds run deep and it takes time and care to repair them, but they can be repaired. As Peter Levine says, trauma is a fact of life but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence.

Monday, May 22, 2017

Trauma often leaves us helpless and powerless and while our response comes from the autonomic nervous system, as in we have no voluntary control over it, there is such a thing as ‘learned helplessness’. We then learn to default to this conditioned state when we perceive threat, even though actual danger/threat might not be present.

Because of learned helplessness, we can cede our power over to people, particularly those that society calls experts, or those we feel have more authority than us. But there are no experts, there are only people with expertise*, the difference between the two in my opinion, is that experts think they know everything there is to know and in that arrogance, try to set everyone straight. People with expertise on the other hand realise that just like everyone, they’re always learning. With an expert you’ll feel less than, with a person who has expertise, you’ll feel equal to. We need guidance, but what we don’t need is to be told what to do or what it is we need, we know that already on some level and a good practitioner will guide us back to that knowing, if we’ve lost trust in it.

St Declan's cliff walk, Ardmore, Co. Waterford, Ireland

Trauma informed care is important. What it means in reality is that someone has been trained to work with trauma or someone has been trained to recognise the signs of trauma and refer on. Many things help us on our journeys through trauma, if it has helped you, it counts, whether it’s yoga, walking, meditation, painting, swimming, reading etc. By utilising whatever it is, you are not saying it is the panacea, you are saying that it is making your life that bit easier and more pleasant. It really can be the ‘small’ things that can add up to the big things in life.

Maybe we’d like aha/breakthrough moments more often, or even just once ;-) and maybe even a magic wand wouldn’t hurt once in a while. Or maybe we do have aha moments and go forward 10 steps only to take 3 steps back. None of our journeys are linear, they look more like the back of a tapestry; a bit of a mess. But we forget that on the front of our tapestry, we’re creating our own unique picture.

We need to remember to count the good in our lives so we get to actually view the real picture every now and then, this will help us through the difficult times by inspiring us and giving us much needed hope and a bit of a break from trying to fix ourselves all the time. This is not a false or forced positivity but a genuine acknowledgement of the good in us and our lives. I think without this balance, we can easily despair and feel hopeless.

* I first heard of the distinction between expertise and experts from a lecturer I had in university.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Inflammation, the language of stress, can show up in lots of different ways and in different organs and in this week’s blog post, I’m going to discuss the bladdermeridian (bladder 2), the eyebrow point in EFT. The bladder meridian is paired with the kidney meridian, which governs fear. The bladder meridian is the guardian of peace and the longest and most complex meridian in the body.

We can get quite overwhelmed when we think of everything that can go wrong, or that has gone wrong, with our health, but if we keep it simple and think in terms of relieving our stress whenever we can, we can really make some big improvements.

Where dis-ease shows up in our body and mind can be symbolic and tapping on the symptoms can be a doorway in to the root cause (which is nearly always a dysregulated nervous system due to undischarged traumatic stress). For example, imbalances in the bladder meridian can show up as excessive urination, interstitial cystitis, pain in the eyes, colds, blurred vision, nasal congestion, abdominal distension and so on. The key is to listen and follow the golden thread that leads us to resolution.

Monday, May 08, 2017

So many of us value ourselves and are valued by others for what we do, not who we are. This drives us to push, force and struggle but we never feel we’re enough or have done enough.

Try saying “I’m enough” out loud, how true does it feel on scale of 0 to 10? 10 being true and 0 being not true at all. Or if you find it difficult to rate how you feel by numbers, what does it feel like in your body when you say these words? How do you know it’s true, not true, or half true etc?

Or try saying it the opposite way “I’m not enough”. Do you have “evidence” to back this belief up? Try tapping on the following and change it to suit you and how you feel. You can download the EFT shortcut in the menu on the right hand side of this page.

Even though I feel that my worth is what I do, not who I am, I accept myself anywayEven though I don’t feel enough because … I completely accept how I feelEven though I don’t feel worthy (of …) I am open to that changing

TH: I’m not enough
Eyebrow: Because … (what memories/people pop up?)
Side of eye: Who I am isn’t enough
Under eye: And that feels …
Under nose: So I have to keep doing …
Under chin: To feel worthy
Collar bone: But it’s never enough
Under arm: I never get “there”

TH: Where is there?
Eyebrow: Love from others?
Side of eye: Love for myself?
Under eye: Acceptance?
Under nose: Validation?
Under chin: How would that feel?
Collar bone: That I’m enough?
Under arm: It would feel …

TH: When did I first feel I wasn’t enough? (Guess, if you don’t know)
Eyebrow: Just as I am
Side of eye: How would it feel
Under eye: Not to have to do anything
Under nose: To be worthy (of …)
Under chin: I could do it because I wanted to
Collar bone: Not because I feel I have to
Under arm: And that would feel …

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Please credit the author Noreen Barron if you wish to share my articles. Please do not amend my works without my explicit permission. All original information provided is solely the opinion of the author. By reading and/or using any of the content on this blog, you are agreeing to take full responsibility for your own health. Thank you.